Levels of sameness: Understanding ‘resistance’ at the level of the therapeutic system

Abstract

The psychoanalytic idea of ‘resistance’ is reframed in terms of a system's inherent tendency to seek stability in the face of change. Resistance is considered on two levels: the intrapsychic level at which an individual seeks to avoid the experience of psychic pain or discomfort, and the interpersonal level at which the therapist and client together constitute a therapeutic system that can manifest an isomorphic tendency to avoid discomfort and to thereby maintain a problem or symptom. The implications for psychotherapy and for psychotherapists of this understanding of resistance are examined. The argument is supported by a juxtaposition and comparison of the therapeutic approaches of two therapists who made their respective marks in psychodynamic and family therapy practice, respectively, during the 1970s – Habib Davanloo, who focused on overcoming intrapsychic resistance, and Salvador Minuchin, whose focus was, in those days, on overcoming resistance at the level of the family system. Both of these therapists created and managed instability within the therapeutic system in order to bring about change in otherwise unchanging problematic circumstances.

Keywords:

• resistance
• psychodynamic psychotherapy
• psychoanalysis
• family therapy
• cybernetics
• therapeutic system

Notes

1. If we were to trace this historical pathway further back in time, we would see that Bateson carried with him cybernetic thinking gleaned from his involvement in the Macy conferences on cybernetics in which he participated between 1946 and 1953, and that these conferences themselves were arranged after Rosenbleuth, Wiener and Bigelow (1943) presented a groundbreaking paper on the nature of purposeful systems, proposing that the idea of negative feedback could account for the mysteries of teleology, at a similar gathering in 1942.

2. Anyone who is familiar with cybernetics will know that since the 1970s there has been a differentiation between what came to be known from that time on as ‘first-order cybernetics’ and ‘second-order cybernetics’. The term ‘second-order’ is used to indicate those concepts or principles that are applied to themselves; hence, ‘second-order cybernetics’ is synonymous with ‘cybernetics of cybernetics’. The simplest distinction between the two was drawn by von Foerster (2003, p. 299), who said that ‘First order cybernetics is the cybernetics of observed systems, while second-order cybernetics is the cybernetics of observing systems’. Such a statement points to the central defining feature of second-order cybernetics: the observer is part of a broader observing system that includes the observed (and vice versa). Second-order cybernetics is concerned with the act of observation, and therefore with epistemology. I have included this point in anticipation of possible criticism that the kind of cybernetics I am referring to here (which begins with a ‘first-order’ description) is not the ‘real’ cybernetics. Such a criticism would be based on the misguided assumption that the development of second-order cybernetics obliterated its first-order principles. Additionally, since I am concerned not only with the psyche of the client, but also with the ‘therapeutic system’, there is an intermingling of the two levels of abstraction offered by first- and second-order cybernetics here. I hope to bring the reader to question the extent to which we create, participate in, or even ‘invent’ the resistance that we might otherwise simply see. Readers interested in second-order cybernetics are referred to Keeney (1983) and von Foerster (2003). Also, familiarity with Bateson's work, beginning with his first book, Naven (1958), first published in 1936, and broadly captured in his anthological Steps to an ecology of mind (1972) and in Mind and nature (1979) reveals that Bateson's cybernetic epistemology incorporated both levels of abstraction long before von Foerster named second-order cybernetics. It is to Bateson's work that the reader truly interested in cybernetics, epistemology, and the relationship between the two is referred.

3. During the 1980s there was much theorizing and debate within the family therapy literature about the idea of homeostasis and its relevance to therapy. I myself consider many of the arguments against the concept to be misguided and overly semantic. Some (e.g. de Shazer, 1984) have argued that Maruyama's (1961) concepts of ‘morphostasis’ and ‘morphogenesis’ have more worth for therapy as they take account of both stability and change. I do not wish to revisit these arguments in the present paper, and will stick with the language of ‘homeostasis’ and ‘equilibrium’.

4. Prigogine's (1978) ideas about far from equilibrium states were among those from other sciences adopted by family therapy along the way.

5. The final sentence in Malan's two paper series on Davanloo's approach is ‘The greatest mistake a therapist can make is not to recognize when response to interpretation is being used as resistance’ (Malan, 1986b).

6. This description of Freud's was offered in the nineteenth of his ‘Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis’, delivered at the University of Vienna between 1915 and 1917.

7. In the contemporary theoretical context of family therapy, which is informed by readings of postmodernism, some may argue that no effort should be made to overcome resistance – in fact, I suspect that many would argue that the very idea of resistance is itself a decidedly unsound, unethical relic derived from the days of ‘first-order’ thinking. There are numerous introductory family therapy textbooks and most would serve as a useful starting point for readers interested in exploring the new theoretical paradigm in family therapy and the broader theoretical evolution of the field; examples are Becvar and Becvar (2003) and Nichols and Schwartz (2003).